The Interpreter by Marcelle Kellermann

Author:Marcelle Kellermann
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781906658199
Publisher: M-Y Books
Published: 2014-07-08T00:00:00+00:00

I returned to Berlin for a few days to be with Freni. Also, I wanted to meet with Rudi and several members of the Berlin underground plotting the assassination of Hitler, their number having increased considerably since Germany's declaration of war on Russia. On my return from Berlin, I stayed a couple of days in Paris. I saw Ludo, Sonia and friends to arrange new codes with them but on my arrival had proof that this would be fraught with danger for the whole Parisian group. Apparently, it worried me more than it worried Ludo who refused my advice that he should leave Paris immediately and make for England. We gather from various sources that Ludo and Sonia had been, for a few weeks, under surveillance from the Funkspiel (the Gestapo's service of counter–espionage).

I asked Werner to urge the two to leave Paris for St Mâlo and to arrange their crossing to England. Werner knew some fishermen who took dissidents across the Channel for a small fee. He used all his persuasive powers on Ludo, to no avail. The two were incarcerated first in Drancy, then in Fresnes prison in March l942 after weeks of gruelling interrogation and torture. They were executed by a firing squad, having refused to talk. A similar fate awaited many more members of the Red Orchestra at the end of the same year and at the beginning of the next. The Grand Chef of the Red Orchestra, Leopold Trepper, was arrested at about the same time. In his case the Gestapo thought he'd be more useful to them alive than dead in view of the wealth of information he could give them, hoping he'd cooperate with them. Fortunately for us he survived to tell the tale and describe in his own book Le Grand Jeu published by Albin Michel (Paris l975) how he outmanoeuvred his jailers by playing the most ingenious double game of espionage. He puts it in a nutshell in his postscript to Gilles Peril's remarkable book 'The Red Orchestra", dated March l971:

“The enemy was unable to detect the smallest detail of information which we (that is, Trepper himself and the members of the Orchestra who had escaped the l943 massacre) transmitted uninterruptedly until the end of the war. Most of the information stemming from the Berlin group of resistance never fell into fascist hands because all messages were passing through Switzerland and Holland.”

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